Prospects for Annihilating Dark Matter in the inner Galactic halo by the Cherenkov Telescope Array

We compute the sensitivity to dark matter annihilations for the forthcoming large Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) in several primary channels and over a range of dark matter masses from 30 GeV up to 80 TeV. For all channels, we include inverse Compton scattering of e$^pm$ by dark matter annihilations on the ambient photon background, which yields substantial contributions to the overall gamma-ray flux. We improve the analysis over previous work by: i) implementing a spectral and morphological analysis of the gamma-ray emission; ii) taking into account the most up-to-date cosmic ray background obtained from a full CTA Monte Carlo simulation and a description of the diffuse astrophysical emission; and iii) including the systematic uncertainties in the rich observational CTA datasets. We find that our spectral and morphological analysis improves the CTA sensitivity by roughly a factor 2. For the hadronic channels, CTA will be able to probe thermal dark matter candidates over a broad range of masses if the systematic uncertainties in the datasets will be controlled better than the percent level. For the leptonic modes, the CTA sensitivity will be well below the thermal value of the annihilation cross-section. In this case, even with larger systematics, thermal dark matter candidates up to masses of a few TeV will be easily studied.

Searches for dark matter subhaloes with wide-field Cherenkov telescope surveys

The presence of substructures in dark matter haloes is an unavoidable consequence of the cold dark matter paradigm. Indirect signals from these objects have been extensively searched for with cosmic rays and gamma-rays. At first sight, Cherenkov telescopes seem not very well suited for such searches, due to their small fields of view and the random nature of the possible dark matter substructure positions in the sky. However, with long enough exposure and an adequate observation strategy, the very good sensitivity of this experimental technique allows us to constrain particle dark matter models. We confront here the sensitivity map of the HESS experiment built out of their Galactic scan survey to the state-of-the-art cosmological N-body simulation Via Lactea II. We obtain competitive constraints on the annihilation cross section, at the level of 10^-24 -10^-23 cm^3s^-1. The results are extrapolated to the future Cherenkov Telescope Array, in the cases of a Galactic plane survey and of an even wider extragalactic survey. In the latter case, it is shown that the sensitivity of the Cherenkov Telescope Array will be sufficient to reach the most natural particle dark matter models.